The Atlantic on Rob Ford

This short essay from the Atlantic website does a good job of distinguishing what is different about Toronto and how it relates to Rob Ford's success.

There are a lot of nerds with money out there ...

First Monty Python reunion show sells out in 43.5 seconds.

An alternative interpretation is that they set the price too low.

Movie: Frozen

We saw Frozen with the six-year-old last night. Frozen is better-than-usual Disney fare that is visually stunning and features a bit of a twist on the usual ending - though it is still a happy one.

The NYT review provides a good summary (and chooses the same favorite song that I would have chosen) but also includes some spoilers.

Recommended for those with young children.

Gratitude

Happy (American) Thanksgiving to all!

Assorted links

1. Lives and tax dollars well spent in Afghanistan.

2. Young people and sex in Japan. I think this is probably just a simple economic story about alternatives to sex with a partner becoming relatively more attractive due to technological change.

3. A fine meditation on growing old from novelist Penelope Lively.

4. I had never heard of this historical episode involving a nuclear weapon in North Carolina before. Scary stuff indeed.

5. Some advice on teaching.

Odd doings at the Minneapolis Fed

The portrayal of Narayana Kocherlakota in this article in the Minneapolis StarTribune does not match my memory from graduate school days. I suspect that there is more to the story, as indeed this Wall Street Journal piece suggests.

Hat tip on the WSJ piece: Ken Troske

This would have been my prior about aerobics ...

"The Economics of Aerobics"
Economic Inquiry, Vol. 52, Issue 1, pp. 201-204, 2014

KEMPER MORELAND, Eastern Michigan University
Department of Economics

This study presents a simple model that weighs the benefits and costs of aerobic exercise to the individual. The model assumes that adding years to life serves as the primary benefit of exercise, and that hours of exercise over a lifetime serve as the cost. Given previous estimates of individual rates of time preference this study finds that people act rationally when they choose to watch a track event rather than choose to run themselves.

Gated version here.